Demonstration held in response to public announcement at subway station requesting passengers to behave morally.

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Two hundred Turks held a mass kissing protest at Ankara’s Kurtulus subway
station on Saturday as opposition protesters tried to intervene, according to a
report in the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News.

There was a heavy police
presence that tried to block protesters from entering the station. The
demonstration was called in response to a public announcement at the station –
requesting passengers to behave morally, targeting young couples that were
“acting inappropriately.” A conservative religious group shouted religious
slogans and the police worked to prevent clashes between the groups, according
to the report.

Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish columnist for Hurriyet and the
author of the book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, told The
Jerusalem Post that the AKP dominated government is “pursuing a policy of moral
conservatism,” but “it would be far-fetched, at this point, to say that this is
tantamount to ‘Islamization,’ let alone the imposition of Islamic
law."

Rather, it is more similar to Christian moral conservatism in the US
“which has similar takes on abortion, education and public intoxication,” he
said adding, “nobody argues that women should be forced to wear a veil or that
adulterers should be stoned,” thus contrasting Turkey with stricter Islamic
societies such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

Michael Rubin, a scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official, who is
currently traveling in Turkey, said that political Islam has little respect for
individual liberty, imposing “its religious dictates on the wider society,
whether or not they ascribe to its beliefs.”

Hence, Rubin finds the
comparison to evangelicals by Akyol to be inaccurate because in Western
democracies there is a separation of powers and constitutionalism, an
institution that has been declining in Turkey over the last decade “under the
guise of reform.”

He went on to add that in 2005, Bulent Arinc, then
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s deputy, warned judges against vetoing the
prime minister’s legislation as unconstitutional. The AKP, Erdogan’s party, he
said, had a super-majority, which could simply dissolve the constitutional
court.

This follows other instances of Islamization in Turkey such as the
report on Friday that Turkey banned advertising alcohol and tightened
restrictions on its sale. Perhaps reflecting this trend, an Israeli cruise to
the country was canceled for security reasons, according to a report in Hurriyet
on Saturday.

Rubin says the context of what is happening in the country
is important. The AKP government has brought a dramatic decline in freedom of the press and drastically changed the education system by making it more Islamic. For example, the minority Alevis attend mandatory Koran classes taught by Sunnis.

“According to Turkey’s
own judiciary, the murder rate of women has increased 1,400 percent between 2002
and 2009. Increased reporting does not really explain that jump; rather, the
feeling among Erdogan’s Islamist constituency that they can act with impunity
upon their own religious mores does,” said Rubin.

On the foreign policy
front, Turkey has supported the al-Qaida linked al-Nusra Front, denying that
jihadism has anything to do with terrorism, Rubin said.

“Turkey does not
have a drinking problem; Erdogan has a problem with drinking,” said Rubin.
“Erdogan has a tolerance problem and a tendency to believe not only that he
knows best, but that there should be no impediment to imposing his will on the
public.”

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